Michael C. Andrews TUFT at Volume Gallery

3 June - 8 July '17

Textile construction has seemingly endless methods of output. The weaver is often thinking about what is possible in the moment of production. This engagement in speculation, fluid thinking, and possibility creates an experience in which the textile form is constant, but what is contained in the form is constantly in flux.

In this spirit of imagination and speculation central to a weaver’s methodology, Andrews investigates the borders of the medium by challenging the function of the loom’s presence with the works in Tuft. Through re-categorizing video and animation software as looms, Andrews is inventing endless warps and infinite wefts using images, 3D modeling, and video sequences. Combining industrial applications with gestural expression, these rugs, or as Andrews’s refers to them “hand-tufted drawings”, are physical, digital and metaphorical.

The works were developed through a year-long relationship with Scott Group Studio, a luxury rug design and manufacturing company based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When touring the factory Andrews was immediately taken by the process and scope of their endeavor - the immense scale of the production equipment; the tactility of the wool; the weight of the rugs; the richness of the custom dyes. Andrews responded to this encounter with the industrial process through fast and gestural drawings was an exciting challenge; to manipulate such physically dense materials into objects that transmit immediacy and porousness through their formal qualities of line and negative space. Color and texture became a place to bind these disparate experiences of weight and methodology.

Andrews’s approach to production, software and apps is guided by direct engagement with color and material. His use of color lies within a spectrum of exuberance and restraint, utilizing experimentation with materialized color to elicit a range of responses, giving form to conflicting and perhaps unresolvable combinations of palettes and codes.

Volume Gallery focuses on American design, with a strong emphasis placed on emerging contemporary designers. The Volume Gallery releases editions, publications and organizes exhibits that showcase the work of American designers to regional, national and international audiences. We are asking critical questions of what it means to be an American designer in a culture that is rapidly becoming more global, while simultaneously examining the American experience.